What is a JBOD storage enclosure?

How can it be used and what applications require JBOD enclosure?

Within a JBOD enclosure you can add solid-state drives and disk drives within the same enclosure. To the host, a JBOD provides access over 6Gb/s or 12Gb/s SAS to each disk individually, making it ideal for software-defined applications or newer operating systems that can directly control the individual disk storage devices and can connect to the host via a SAS controller or SAS RAID controller to provide multiple RAID levels utilising the drives within the JBOD.

Protection

A JBOD offers no data protection against drive failure unless you use a RAID controller. Applications that can use JBOD enclosure are Windows Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix, Nexenta, Caringo, Scality, DataCore, Open-e etc. These use software to create data protection on the storage and as well as protecting data across multiple chassis by writing the data multiple times.

Storage Types

Depending on the type and size of JBOD and whether it has a single or dual SAS controllers that allow you to daisy chain them together. Using multiple controllers allow configurations to support over 512 drives these can be SSD, hard disks both SATA or SAS. With a dual SAS controller based system would allow you to share the storage between a couple of host systems each with access to their own drives. In addition to this, there is software available share all the storage using file locking software.

Software Defined

More and more software applications today are choosing software RAID vs hardware RAID. The reason for this is that rather than write drivers for all the specific RAID controllers it is far easier to write a driver to view individual drives in a JBOD and create a software RAID level. Applications that require Just a bunch of disk storage are Nutanix, Nexenta, Caringo, Scality, DataCore, Open-e, HPC, Hadoop etc. These use software to create data protection on the storage and as well as protecting data across multiple chassis by writing the data blocks multiple times.

Certifications

Many of the JBOD enclosures we supply are fully tested and certified to work with Microsoft Windows, VMware, Datacore etc.

How can we help?

We supply a complete range of JBOD enclosures from 12-bay through to 80-bay with support for 12Gb/s host connectivity with 2 or 4 ports, 12Gb/s SAS drives or SSD drives and 6Gb/s SATA hard disks. Daisy chaining is also supported using 12Gb/s connections.